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Title: The sad facts behind Rick Perry’s Texas miracle
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URL Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini ... 11/08/16/gIQAxc3zJJ_story.html
Published: Aug 17, 2011
Author: Harold Meyerson
Post Date: 2011-08-17 14:05:55 by Skip Intro
Keywords: None
Views: 5514
Comments: 15
Rick Perry’s Texas is Ross Perot’s Mexico come north. Through a range of enticements we more commonly associate with Third World nations — low wages, no benefits, high rates of poverty, scant taxes, few regulations and generous corporate subsidies — the state has produced its own “giant sucking sound,” attracting businesses from other states to a place where workers come cheap. Perry’s calling card in the presidential race is his state’s record of job creation at a time when the national economy floundered. Yes, Texas has created lots of jobs, though that’s partly a reflection of the surge in oil prices, which in turn created tens of thousands of jobs in the oil and gas industries. What Perry touts in his stump speech, however, isn’t the oil boom but, rather, the low-tax, low-reg, handouts-to-business climate that prevails in Texas. It’s the kind of spiel that businesses hear every day from leaders of developing nations — Mexico and, even more, China. Consider the Texas that Perry holds up to the rest of the nation for admiration. It has the fourth-highest poverty rate of any state. It tied with Mississippi last year for the highest percentage of workers in minimum-wage jobs. It ranks first in adults without high school diplomas. Twenty-six percent of Texans have no health insurance — the highest percentage of medically uninsured residents of any state. It leads the nation in the percentage of children who lack medical insurance. Texas has an inordinate number of employers who provide no insurance to their workers, partly because insurance rates are high, thanks to an absence of regulations. Perry seems quite comfortable with the state’s lagging performance in what we might term the pursuit-of-happiness index. Consider his indifference toward education: In 2008, the state comptroller found that 12 percent of Texans lacked high school diplomas and that the level would rise to 30 percent by 2040 unless the state’s commitment to education was considerably increased. This year, though, when confronted with a $2741;billion budget deficit, Perry did not raise taxes but instead slashed $441;billion from K-12 schools. In this regard, the equation of Perry with China’s leaders is unfair to China: The Chinese understand that the better educated their people become, the more high-skill and high-compensating jobs their nation will attain. No such understanding seems to have permeated Perry’s brain. In one significant particular, though, Perry’s policies fairly ape the Chinese. Over the past eight years, the state has given businesses nearly $500 million in grants and financial incentives to help them expand. Perry’s economic vision is the kind of race-to-the-bottom mercantilism we’ve come to expect from developing nations in the globalized economy, although, as China, Brazil and India illustrate, many such nations have begun to provide citizens with more schooling and better jobs as they grow wealthier. No comparable developments can be seen in Rick Perry’s Texas. Now Perry wants to take his model national. In “Fed Up,” his campaign manifesto, he says the federal government has gone too far by passing laws “regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, [and] creating national minimum wage laws.” These are all endeavors, he argues, that should be left to the states. I could understand how a governor with a good record on providing medical insurance, for instance, could argue that his state’s plan is one the nation should emulate. But when the governor of the state with the highest level of medical uninsurance calls for dismantling the national programs and letting states go their own way, that’s industrial-strength chutzpah. What Perry either ignores or doesn’t know is how greatly Texas has benefited from the investments and regulations of the federal government he despises. He grew up, he tells all who will listen, on a small, hardscrabble Texas farm. But it was Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration that brought electricity to those farms, which, left to the mercies of the market, would have remained dark for decades. The New Deal threw money at Texas, bringing it dams, highways and schoolhouses. The cumulative effect of policies such as the federal minimum wage has been to diminish the disparity that long existed between the industrialized North and the more poverty-stricken South. Perry wants to unravel the national social contract and once again have us go state by state, with the low-wage, low-reg states dragging down the others, much as Chinese mercantilism has dragged down wages and living standards across the United States. He is the 21st-century, homegrown version of the Manchurian candidate.
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#1. To: Skip Intro (#0)
Exposing Perry.... 1. He's a big beneficiary of big-government Perry's No. 1 talking point as a presidential candidate is job creation in Texas. He claims correctly that Texas has created more than one-third of all jobs in the country since the economic recovery began in mid-2009. What he doesn't mention is that virtually all of that job creation was in government, not in private industry. Translation for Republican retards = He is a hypocrite. 2. The "Texas Miracle" is unraveling Texas has been able to delay the kinds of sharp cutbacks in government payrolls and services that most other states have been forced to undertake, partly because of a strong energy sector that helped sustain the state's tax revenues during the early part of the recession. But Texas now seems poised for steep cuts in government services, just like many other strapped states. Translation for Republican retards = By supporting the smaller govt kooks in the GOP he screwed his own state's growth. 3. What's good for Texas is bad for America's drivers When oil and gas prices rise, the Texas economy gets a big boost. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, every 10 percent rise in oil prices boosts annual economic output in Texas by half a percentage point, and employment by 0.36 percentage points. Translation for Republican retards = Texas is in league with OPEC (When OPEC does well so does Texas). 4. He sounds clueless about monetary policy Perry's first pronouncement on the Federal Reserve as a presidential candidate was a convoluted mouthful of economically illiterate posturing. When asked his opinion of the Fed, Perry said of chairman Ben Bernanke, "If this guy prints more money between now and the election ... we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous—or treasonous." Translation for Republican retards = He might not sound stupid to the Republican cult members that don't listen to anyone other than their own kind but to the rest of the nation, including the big players in business, he sounds like a rube hick.
By the way, is your real name BOB BECKEL by any chance. You seem to be just about as SNOOTY and ARROGANT as FAUX Snooze's new "Liberal" former booze hound media whore that at least partially replaced their "Conservative" former booze hound media whore GLENN DRECK.
Bingo!! Nice call CSnake
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#11. To: Godwinson (#1)
#12. To: Coral Snake, Godwinson (#11)
By the way, is your real name BOB BECKEL by any chance.
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